The Weight of a Nation

What's heavier, the long odds or the Olympic dreams? The hopes of his Navajo tribe or the burdens he has inherited? And how many times can a broken man lift himself up? Brandon Leslie is about to find out.

In a wistful tone, his voice barely rising above the June morning's domestic tumult, Brandon Leslie says this to his training partner, Santiago Morales. Little Brandon, Leslie's son, plays a video game in the living room. In the kitchen, Leslie's wife, Nelvina, feeds breakfast to Haley, the couple's 3-year-old daughter. Cody, Leslie's stepson, wanders around the house spinning a lariat.

The two runners break from the rented stucco house in a working-class neighborhood of west Albuquerque and trot a half-mile to the bike trail on a levee along a brackish slough of the Rio Grande. The trailhead lies just off a busy thoroughfare. Both runners work shirtless in the 90-degree heat; Leslie wears a blue ball cap against the desert sun. A few scrawny cottonwoods droop over the slough, but the asphalt trail is shadeless, and power lines hum overhead. Still, the path is flat, with each kilometer and mile clearly marked. The men swig from water bottles that Cody and Little Brandon have delivered from the house. Little Brandon, who turns 11 today, clutches a Frisbee that he received for his birthday, while 12-year-old Cody fiddles with his cell phone.

"How long do you think this will take?" Cody asks.

"A couple of hours," Leslie says.

"Then we can go to Grandma's?"

This afternoon the family will drive 120 miles west across New Mexico to Leslie's mother's house in Gallup, where they'll celebrate Little Brandon's birthday. Tomorrow, in the town of Window Rock, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation, Leslie will deliver a talk to his tribespeople about his athletic career, which has contained more peaks and valleys than the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He'll explain that God has granted him a gift for running, and that despite Leslie's repeated, self-destructive attempts to reject this gift over a career spanning more than a decade, God hasn't let him give it up. Cody, who loves horses, is simply eager to get to Gallup and the reservation.

"I've got to do this work," Leslie says. "I can't rush it, Cody."

The boys are just beginning to understand what Leslie, 31, does for a living, and why, despite the family's precarious finances (lacking a shoe sponsor, Leslie counts on the local McDonald's as a primary source of support), he insists on training full-time. While his overarching goal is redemption, his specific aim is to make the 2008 U.S. Olympic Marathon team. Ritzenhein, Meb Keflezighi, Alan Culpepper, Ryan Hall, and the other favorites won't dissipate their energy with a nonrunning job; therefore, neither will Leslie.

"What are we doing?" Morales asks.

"Ten 1-K repeats, at just under three minutes."

Ideally, at this point in the season, Leslie would be running 15 repeats at 2:45. However, he's rehabbing a tender hamstring. He had suffered the injury nearly three months earlier, in March, as he was preparing for a 10,000-meter race at a track meet at Stanford University.

He had arrived at the meet hungry to follow up on his breakthrough 2006 season. Last October, at the Chicago Marathon, Leslie bettered his previous PR by more than seven minutes, running 2:15:20, finishing 17th overall and seventh among American men. Earlier, he'd set personal bests in the 5-K, 10-K, and half-marathon and had represented the United States at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Japan, where he finished 55th.

"I was feeling really good that day at Stanford," Leslie says, adjusting the visor of his cap. "At least, physically." He was jogging a routine warmup lap when his hamstring popped. The injury wiped out his entire spring season.

"I still wonder why it happened," he says. "It probably had to do with stress. I was upset about not getting a shoe contract. I felt like I deserved one after my 2006 season. I didn't know how I could keep running and supporting my family without it. But I've been through worries like that before, and I never got hurt."

Leslie pauses for a long moment. "My father thinks that witchcraft was involved," he says. "You see, I might have enemies out on the reservation. Maybe some Navajo guys I used to drink with who resent that I don't hang with them anymore. Others might think that it's evil for one Navajo to stand out from others--to make a name for himself in the outside world."
He gives a shrug. "If they exist, some of these people might have put their money together and hired a man to make bad medicine," he says. "Maybe the medicine was on someone's fingers when he shook my hand; someone I thought was my friend."

Leslie goes quiet. Deep lines flare from his nose down to the corners of his mouth, and acne scars give his brown cheeks the look of weathered rock. His thick, round glasses, which in some lights lend his face a boyish, Harry Potter-like cast, now make him seem middle-aged.

"That's all possible," he says, "but the only enemy I know about for sure lives in the mirror. Look, I know I'm a long shot at the Trials; my PR is seven minutes slower than Ryan Hall's. But if everything goes right--my health and my preparation, the wind and the weather, and if I pray properly for protection--then I have a chance." He looks up and grins. "Hey, anything can happen in a marathon, right?"

Leslie's grin flattens as he sets his watch and steps to the line. "I wonder what Ryan is doing right now," he says.

More than a decade earlier--although it often seems like yesterday--Brandon Leslie was considered the blazing young talent that Ryan Hall is today. In December 1994, Leslie, representing Gallup High School, finished third at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships, running 15:06, eight seconds behind winner Matt Downin. The year before, as a junior, Leslie had finished sixth at the famous Foot Locker finals in which Adam Goucher and Meb Keflezighi took the first two places, respectively. After a decade-long dark age, a renaissance was building in American elite distance running, and Leslie, a full-blooded member of the Navajo Nation, stood in the thick of it.

"This was in the days before all the Web sites and blogs and chat rooms, so all you had to go on were a guy's times," recalls Goucher, a 2000 Olympian in the 5000 meters. "I saw the times Brandon put up in the altitude in New Mexico, and I wondered if they could be for real. Then when I finally got a look at him, I saw that he was this incredible talent. Brandon stood out from the field, and that year the field was loaded."

The fact that Leslie was Navajo added to his allure. Thirty years had passed since Billy Mills, a Sioux from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, had won a gold medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Olympics, and the sport eagerly awaited another Native American champion. Indeed, given the rich American Indian running tradition, especially in New Mexico, where distance-running had been intrinsic to the Navajo and Pueblo Indian cultures for centuries, many wondered why champions such as Mills weren't common.

In lifestyle, diet, and genetic adaptation, Indian runners from New Mexico and Arizona resembled elite distance runners from Kenya and Ethiopia. Like the Africans, the tribes produced prep champions profusely. Unlike the Africans, confoundingly few Native American runners progressed to higher competitive levels.

Gallup High School teams, for instance, in which about 90 percent of the athletes typically claim Navajo ethnicity, have dominated New Mexico cross-country, winning 31 team and 18 individual state championships. Wings of America, a New Mexico-based club comprising Native American prep runners from around the country, won 11 boys' and nine girls' junior national cross-country team titles from 1988 through 2007. Since '88, more than 20,000 Indian runners have attended Wings programs.

But something happens to these runners once they leave high school. During the 2004-2005 academic year, the most recent examined, approximately 25,000 student athletes competed on NCAA Division I, II, and III cross-country teams; only around 100 runners, or .4 percent, were Native American. Both African-Americans and Hispanics, minority groups with less success on the prep cross-country level, had significantly higher rates of NCAA cross-country representation.

"The freshman-year syndrome is notorious among Navajo college students," explains Leonard Joe, a high-school counselor on the Navajo Nation. "Young people leave the reservation, and no matter how well prepared we think they are and how many resources a university makes available to them, they fall apart when they arrive on campus, and drop out after a semester or two. They can't adjust to the independence, the impersonality, and the pace of university life. And it's even worse for Native American student athletes, who are typically under greater pressure."

"There are probably 10 kids every year coming off the reservation who could be first-rate runners in college, but they don't make it," agrees Mike Daney, a member of the Cherokee tribe and Leslie's former coach at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, a junior college. "And the ones who don't make it often go back to the reservation and undermine the student runners coming after them. It's the crabs-in-the-bucket syndrome. Every Native American knows about it. One crab starts to crawl out of the bucket, and the others pull it back in."

Leslie, however, seemed to be the crab who would crawl out of the bucket, the Native American runner who finally would develop into the next Billy Mills. Along with talent, he possessed poise, maturity, and judgment. As a teen he had seen the waste of alcoholism in his own family and avoided succumbing to it. Among his classmates and fellow runners, he had repeatedly witnessed the disappointing freshman-year syndrome.

If any young Navajo appeared to be inoculated against these conditions, it was Brandon Leslie.
Morales and Leslie punch their watches and take off on the first repeat, running one kilometer up the path, resting one minute, then returning. As they pound the trailhead, Leslie slightly ahead, their chests are slick with sweat.

"Two fifty-seven," Leslie reports with satisfaction, and sets off on the third repeat. On the next trip back, Morales, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, trails 20 meters behind Leslie. Two kilometers later he's running 50 meters behind, and at the end of the next repeat he drops his hands to his knees in exhaustion. Leslie runs the next two Ks solo, moving with a fluid, balanced, loose-hipped stride.

"Well, I guess Brandon's hamstring is doing okay," Morales says, straightening up from his crouch. As he watches his partner run off, Morales talks about how he had first heard of Leslie when he was attending the Haskell Indian Nations University, the famed school for American Indians in Kansas. "Everybody knew about him. Brandon is an icon in the Indian world. The things he's been through, the way he's shouldered the expectations of his family, his clan, his tribe, of all the Native American nations--I really admire Brandon," Morales says. "It's an honor for an athlete like me to run with him. But sometimes I think Brandon can be too hard on himself."

Morales pauses, looking up the trail, where Leslie is just running into sight. "Would I want to trade places with him?" he asks. "I don't think so."

As a boy, Leslie lived in Gallup with his mother, Sharon, during the week, going to school and shooting hoops. On weekends and vacations, he lived out on the reservation with his father, Sibert, on a ranch that was home to multiple generations of Leslies.

Sibert had been a standout 103-pound wrestler at Gallup High in the 1970s, turning down a college wrestling scholarship in order to live on the ranch and scrape coal and uranium out of the earth. He had a profound influence on his son. On the ranch, Brandon would ride horses, rope calves, and practice for the rodeo. Sibert also taught Brandon the traditional Navajo ceremonies, dances, and rituals. When Brandon was 14, Sibert accompanied his son through the Crown Dance ceremony on the Apache Nation in Arizona. Brandon recalls that he neither ate nor slept during the ceremony and that at the end of two days, he couldn't tell the difference between the pounding of the drums and the beating of his heart.

It was, in many ways, an idyllic life--until the holidays came around. Christmas was a dark time. So dark that for years Leslie dreaded the season. "The uranium mine on the reservation near Church Rock paid out Christmas bonuses to its workers," he explains. "My dad would take his bonus and disappear for a week or two. He would drink, and do drugs, and sell drugs. We thought he'd end up dead one day, or in prison. Finally he went through rehab down at the Indian Health Service hospital in Phoenix."

The rehab helped Sibert get back on track, but so did running. "My dad would enter road races around Gallup and the reservation," Brandon says. "I think running helped him keep away from drinking. He was good at the 10-K and ran a sub-three-hour marathon. Sometimes I'd tag along and run myself, but just for fun. I was into basketball."

Originally, Leslie ran cross-country just as a way to get in shape for basketball season. But his talent showed from the first steps he ran at Gallup High in the fall of 1991. Under longtime coach Curtis Williams, the team operated as a strict hierarchy based on seniority; underclassmen paid their dues, running in JV meets, while upperclassmen claimed the varsity spots. At the season's first meet, against a top-ranked team from Page, Arizona, Leslie simultaneously upheld and overturned Gallup High's tradition by running and winning the varsity race. He finished third in the state cross-country championships as a freshman and won the meet the following two years. In the Foot Locker Championships, Leslie logged the highest two finishes ever for a male Native American runner. In 1994, Leslie set the New Mexico state record in the two-mile, running a 9:07.82 as a junior.

His style, moreover, was electric; he raced aggressively, pushing the pace, exhibiting none of the timidity often associated with American Indian athletes. He was also tall, good-looking, and self-assured. He had overcome a learning disability to succeed as a student, traveled frequently to competitions outside the Southwest, and supplied articulate interviews to the media. In 1993, he was featured on a segment about Navajo runners for CBS's Sunday Morning program.

"Brandon just carried himself differently than other Navajo kids," recalls Joe Vigil, Leslie's current coach and the former longtime coach at Adams State College in Colorado. "He had more confidence and charisma than most Indian athletes."

But as much as running brought him glory, it also proved a burden, pulling him away from rodeo and basketball. And because he was so naturally talented, he didn't always get the credit that was due. At the Foot Locker Championships in San Diego in '93, runners from around the country talked about how they trained every day, all year round. Leslie, by contrast, said that he never ran a step once cross-country or track season ended. He would stay in shape by playing basketball and working on the ranch.

"Rumors started going around that I was lazy, that I'd gotten where I was purely on natural ability," he says. "I wasn't lazy, but those other guys thought so. Even worse, I imagined that they thought so. It's a mind trip that every Native American athlete--that every Native American, period--has to deal with."

Unsurprisingly, Leslie was recruited by more than a hundred universities, including schools such as Yale and the U.S. Naval Academy. He accepted a scholarship from Northern Arizona University, due to its strong distance-running program and proximity to Gallup. He went off to college in September 1995, seemingly destined for greatness. He lasted barely six months.
Arriving home for the holidays in December, Leslie learned that his high school girlfriend was pregnant with his child. Little Brandon was born the next June. Distracted and demoralized, Leslie dropped out of school and quit running.

"I was just disgusted and depressed that this thing could have happened," Leslie says. "I wanted to crawl in a hole, find some sort of job in Gallup, and support my child. And that's what I did. I quit school and I quit running."

On the surface, the effort seemed like a sacrifice, a notable act of maturity and responsibility. On a deeper level, however, Leslie sought to escape the pressure of high expectations. He seized the chance to free himself of his troublesome gift.

"It would have taken a lot of discipline for me to stay in school, keep running, and fulfill my responsibilities as a father, but there were people willing to help me, and I could have done it," Leslie says. "Confronted with my first real challenge, I caved. I was no different than all those other supposedly great Navajo runners from Gallup High--one semester of college, and I was back home, pissing and moaning about my bad luck."

Under the midday Albuquerque sun, Leslie pounds out his final repeat, kicking it home in just under 2:45, and afterward sips water and relaxes in the shade of a cottonwood. He remains bare-chested, and the talk turns to the tattoos on his arms and trunk.

"I got these back in high school with my cousin," he says, fingering the Chinese characters on his biceps, reading "strength," "courage," and "wisdom." "I got picked on a lot because I was so good at everything--school, basketball, and, later, running. You see, in the Native American culture, you're not supposed to stand out. Everything is geared toward the collective good of the group. So the other boys gave me a hard time. I was never much of a fighter; luckily, my cousin took care of that for me."

The cousins and uncles, aunts and nephews, still offer boundless support for Leslie. At a benefit 5-K road race for him in May on the reservation, for instance, about half of the crowd of 100 was a member of the extended family. A group of runners came from Gallup High School. There was also a young Navajo woman named Tiffany Sorrell, a distance runner who's on the track and cross-country teams at the University of Arizona.

"I'm the only Native American runner on the women's team," Sorrell said. "There aren't many people who understand the pressure that entails. But Brandon does, and I've been lucky to be able to talk to him about it."

After handing out the awards at the race, Leslie addressed the crowd. "People ask me if I'm proud to be able to represent my country at international competitions," he said. "I tell them that first I'm proud to represent my family. Next, I'm proud to represent my tribe. And then I'm proud to represent my country."

As the applause faded, Leslie seemed unsure about how to conclude the program. His mother, standing near the microphone, provided some sotto voce instructions.

After quitting Northern Arizona, Leslie lived with Sharon in their mobile home and worked as a teacher's aide in Gallup. He spent time with his infant son and the baby's mother, and fooled around with basketball. He seemed to have settled back into the anonymous bucket of Navajo life, until fate intervened.

In the summer of 1997, Leslie received a phone call from Daney, whose teams at SIPA had won four national junior college cross-country championships. The coach invited Leslie to join his program. "We met at a Denny's in Gallup," Leslie recalls. "Coach D. knows all the Native American sob stories backward and forward. He didn't lecture me. He was all structure and plan: 'Here's what you do to get a degree; here's what you do to become the runner you were meant to be.'"

Under Daney's guidance, and with Sharon assuming primary care for Little Brandon, Leslie resurrected his running career, winning an individual national junior college cross-country championship in 1998. The following year he accepted a scholarship offer at Adams State (Vigil had previously retired as coach at the school), where he won the Division II NCAA 10,000-meter championships in 2000. In the summer of 2001, after completing his collegiate eligibility, he ran the 10,000 meters at the World University Games in Beijing, finishing 15th.

So against long odds, Leslie had redeemed his pawned diamond. At the age of 25, he was again on the verge of fulfilling his early promise. Ample time remained to train for the '04 Olympic Trials. He just had to hook up with a training group in Flagstaff or Boulder, or even return to Albuquerque and work with Daney, and his dreams would fall within reach. All Leslie had to do, in short, was keep running. Instead, he came back to Gallup and the reservation--and began to drink. His genetic predisposition for alcoholism finally caught up with him. Sibert is a recovering alcoholic, and two of Sharon's brothers had died from the disease.

"Beyond my family history, I can't tell you why I started to drink," Brandon says. "I guess it was the same thing that made me quit running after Little Brandon was born. Except this time it was worse. I had already blown it once. Now I was older, and I had even more to lose."
For the first time since he was 14, there were no coaches posting his next workout, no reporters wanting to write a story about the next Billy Mills. Just long, easy days and nights hanging out with friends who had watched him during his glory days at Gallup High and had supported him through his first crash. They were all still here, on the Navajo Nation, a sovereign land of 165,000 residents, covering a territory the size of West Virginia, where Leslie would never have to explain himself or feel like a stranger. On the nation, you could find a party every night and someone who was always eager to buy the great Brandon Leslie a beer--or two or three.

Despite his father's example and countless others around the reservation, all that he'd accomplished as an athlete, the fact that he was a hero and role model to young Navajo, and his seemingly limitless future, Leslie drank. "Or maybe," he admits, "I drank because of those things. I was hanging out with my friends, and I just wanted to soak it all in. I told myself there'd be time to run later, time to train later. 'Have another beer, Brandon,' my friends would say. For almost two years, I never turned one down."

Leslie degenerated to the extent that the tattoo that crosses his belly--his surname, in two-inch-high, Old English letters--turned illegible beneath the beer fat. "That seemed about right," he says, "because it was pretty clear that I'd forgotten who I was." He would wake up hungover on the couch of his mother's trailer. Sharon would plead with him, Sibert would threaten him, Coach Daney would give him disgusted looks, but most nights Leslie returned to the bars. In the warm glow of the neon beer signs, everybody was his friend. There was no more rancor or jealousy directed toward him from his tribesmen, because Brandon Leslie no longer stood out. His failure and weakness validated their own failures and weaknesses. If a Navajo as gifted as Leslie couldn't make it on the outside, why should they even try?

Leslie and Morales trot back to the house. there are many preparations for that afternoon's trip to Gallup and Little Brandon's party, but he wants to cling to the glow of the workout. "Why don't you stay for lunch, Santiago?" Leslie asks. Morales hesitates. "Come on, it'll be okay. I'll give Coach D. a call, and he can come over, too."

Back at the house, Nelvina has left a note saying she's taken the kids to the supermarket. Leslie calls Daney, who accepts the lunch invitation. Leslie passes around cold water bottles and brews a pot of coffee. "Coach D. loves coffee," he says.

Mike Daney turns out to be a small, intense, ponytailed man who looks 10 years younger than his actual 50. "During these last few years working with Coach Vigil, Brandon has finally learned that you have to eat, sleep, and breathe running 24 hours a day," Daney says. The problem with such a schedule, though, is that at times it pulls him away from his other responsibilities, namely Nelvina and the three kids. The dual pressures can be depleting. "Let's just say that I've gotten to know Brandon pretty well," Daney goes on. "Just before every big race, two things happen: He gets sick, and there seems to be more tension in his household."

Leslie nods. "Nelvina doesn't understand running," he says. "She comes from another part of my life. She doesn't get what it means to run in the Olympic Trials--how hard it is, how much concentration it takes."

During the last few years working with Coach Vigil, Leslie explains, he has spent month-long stints in Flagstaff, training at altitude, with focused, full-time concentration, removed from family distractions. "Nelvina has a problem with that," he says.

"I try to explain to her that a lot of what I do as a professional athlete isn't my choice," he continues. "Last year, when I ran really well, it was because of that focused time I had up at altitude, running with guys like Ryan Shay, working with Coach Vigil. And I've got to do it again this year--even if it costs me my marriage."

The doorknob turns, and Nelvina, a quiet, pretty, 26-year-old woman with a round face and flashing smile, enters with the kids. She takes in the scene at a glance--her husband, Daney, and Morales sprawled on the couch--and moves into the kitchen with the groceries. The men look uneasy and lower their voices.

A full-blooded Navajo who had grown up on the reservation, Nelvina Silago knew nothing about Brandon's running career when they first met during his drinking years--just that he was a tall, handsome, good-time man, and everybody in the Navajo community wanted to be his friend. "He was fun and nice," she recalls, "especially at first."

But as the months wore on, she realized that Brandon, fueled with beer, could be cutting and mean. "I would get drunk," he says, "and say hateful things to Nelvina." In a way, Nelvina was fortunate; she hadn't known him when he was a running star, so she couldn't conceive how much he had changed. Over time, though, she started to comprehend her boyfriend's former stature. As 2002 slid into 2003, she heard the talk around the taverns. Brandon Leslie used to be a tremendous runner...You wouldn't know it to look at him now, but this dude was one of the greats...CBS came out and filmed a segment on him...He was going to make the Olympics, Nelvina; Billy Mills even said so...

The drunken Navajo could-have-beens: The nation was loaded with them. Brandon Leslie's father had been one. Like father, like son. Now Brandon was one of them, too.

Brandon heard the talk as well. "That was enough," he says. "I couldn't stand to hear those voices anymore. I couldn't stand to see the looks on the faces of my little nieces and nephews. But most of all I was ashamed to face Nelvina. I couldn't stand the fact that we had gotten so close, and she didn't know who I really was."

So in the summer of 2003, Leslie indulged in one final beer soak. He rode out one last hangover at his mother's trailer and absorbed one last dagger look from his father. And then he rose from the couch.

"One day that summer I bumped into Brandon at SIPI," Daney recalls. "He was a few units short of his bachelor's degree, and he'd come to Albuquerque to take a class. He must have weighed 165 pounds and, except for a little bit of basketball, hadn't exercised for more than a year. So I invited him to come out and run some with our team, just for his health. By his fourth week back, Brandon was beating up on my guys, and it was around then when he started to talk about the 2004 Olympic Trials."

In April 2004, in the 10,000 meters at the Mt. SAC Relays in California, Leslie met the Olympic Trials B standard of 28:50. That performance earned him financial support from the Native American Sports Council, which allowed him to train full-time for the rest of the season. Leslie ran a disappointing 30:31.77 at the Olympic Trials in Sacramento, finishing next to last, but his mere presence in the race was a triumph. Afterward, Billy Mills hugged Leslie and said he was proud of him. Leslie subsequently met with Vigil and set his sights on the marathon, an event more forgiving to a runner approaching 30.

"I looked him in the eye and asked him if he was ready to make the necessary sacrifice," Vigil says. "He said yes, and he has never wavered in that commitment."

Leslie's work over the past three years paid off when he clocked his qualifying time in Chicago, earning him a spot in New York for the Trials on November 3. Once again he'll be up against America's best distance runners, including Keflezighi and, perhaps, Goucher, his old rivals from high school. The days when Leslie could eye these men as equals, however, are past. Goucher and Keflezighi have fulfilled their early promise, and enjoy the resulting fruits--TV commercials, video blogs, and, most important, shoe-endorsement contracts, providing an ample, predictable income.

Leslie, by contrast, lacks the r?m?o justify a similar contract. He must cobble a living from a patchwork of small sponsorships: the McDonald's franchises on the reservation, a mining company and miners' union operating on the Navajo Nation, and a modest stipend from Brooks shoes. All of that barely adds up to $20,000. Leslie supplements his income with prize winnings from races and money raised from benefit dances, rodeos, and road races organized by his mother on the reservation. It's enough to keep his running dreams alive and his family together, but just barely.

"I do my best to support Brandon," Nelvina says. "I want him to achieve his dream, but sometimes that takes a toll on our family--financially and emotionally. A period like now, when it's been a long time since he won much money at a race, then we struggle to pay the bills. It's also hard when he's away from home for weeks at a time, and I'm alone with the kids."

Brandon acknowledges the dilemma, which may be intractable. "I'm not some 22-year-old who can live out of the back of his van," he says. "It's hard on Nelvina. I think she would have been a lot happier if I was just a regular guy with a 9-to-5 job. Sometimes I think I'd be happier that way. But I have let go of running twice in my life, and I'm not going to let it go a third time. I'm not doing this for selfish reasons, at least not totally. For several years I let down the Navajo young people who looked up to me. I am not going to disappoint them again."

Just before dawn the next morning in Gallup, Leslie rises quietly, slips into his running gear, and moves outside his mother's trailer onto the packed-dirt yard. The family, including Leslie's parents and younger brother, Sibert Jr., had been up late the night before, celebrating Little Brandon's birthday. Near the end of the evening, for the benefit of Cody and Little Brandon, Leslie opened the scrapbook that contained all the college recruiting letters that he'd received more than a decade earlier. Leslie handled them carefully, as if they were pages from a rare book, and spoke of them not as opportunities lost but as open invitations to a proud life still in the making.

Leslie takes his time stretching. The high-desert air is cool and clear, and the dawn light inflames the Red Rock, a jagged sandstone formation lifting thousands of feet over the trailer park on the eastern edge of Gallup. After yesterday's hard workout he will go relatively easy this morning, 12 miles at a six-minute pace along Superman Canyon, so named because a scene in Superman was filmed there in the 1970s. Leslie needs to get his miles in early because he's scheduled to speak at 10 a.m. in Window Rock, about a 30-minute drive from Gallup.

"This is the kind of run that, a few years ago, I just might have blown off," he says, tying one shoelace. "I would have rationalized that I'd been up late last night after a long drive, that I'd had a good hard run yesterday, and that I had a lot to do today. I would have just rolled over in bed. Maybe I would have run later in the day, maybe not. Now, at my age, with so much on the line, I'm not going to cheat myself."

He lifts his left leg up on the hood of his car, stretching his hamstrings. "My leg feels great this morning, no tightness at all," he says. "But sometime before the Trials, I'll still come back to the reservation and go through the Protection Prayer ceremony."

This ceremony, which usually lasts one evening, "is for people who are going on a long journey, or for soldiers who are going off to the war, or for someone who's going into the hospital for an operation," says Johnson Dennison, a Navajo medicine man. "The medicine man doesn't pray for success--at least not in the way the Anglo world defines it. He prays for a positive outcome. He prays for protection against the enemy. The medicine man makes no distinction between an enemy that threatens from outside of a person and one that rises from within."

Leslie lowers his leg from the car hood, then takes off running, out of the trailer park, cutting behind a Best Western motel, and dodging the big semis gearing up on Route 66, climbing toward the Interstate 40 interchange. As he runs, he plots what he'll say to his audience in Window Rock, which will include Navajo employees of the federal government, his sponsors from McDonald's, the mine, and the union, and members of his family. Many among them, knowing nothing about the sport, will think that competing in the Trials is the same as running the marathon in the actual Games. Others will think that he must place in the top three in New York City and qualify for Beijing, or his marathon will be a failure.

Brandon Leslie will try to explain that he is running for his family, tribe, and his own sense of honor; for people, Navajo or anybody else, who have screwed up repeatedly, hurt the ones they have loved, taken the very best within themselves and trashed it not once but over and over again, throwing their gift back at God and running away to hide. But there is no place to hide. If by some miracle he finished in the top three--if everything possible goes right for him and wrong for Meb, Ryan, Ritzenhein, and all the other favorites--that will be fine. But it is running well that matters, and is the best that Leslie can reasonably hope for.

He crosses 66 just as the sun explodes over the rim of Red Rock, then he dips into a culvert over a cattle crossing and runs beneath an underpass and soon he is beyond the town, on a gravel road lifting toward the sandstone canyons where his father's ranch lies, where every pinion and juniper tree possesses a name and a story, and where, for generations, angry young Navajo men have fired empty beer cans out the windows of their pickups.

Leslie knows every inch of this luminous, merciless road, which today he covers in an out-and-back route. His turnaround point lies several miles ahead, and he must keep a vigilant pace.